Android's all-star lineup (some of which is pictured here) has propelled it to top RIM (BlackBerry) and Apple (iPhone) in the smartphone market.

Google posts an amazing 886 percent year-to-year growth in sales

When
Google's Android mobile OS launched it
was met with skepticism, pessimism, and doubt. Slowly but surely,
Google recruited new hardware partners, launched new handsets,
eventually reaching sales
of 65,000 units a day -- then
100,000. And Google maintained a relentless pace of OS
releases -- with such high profile updates as Android 1.5, 2.0, 2.1,
and, most recently, 2.2
(Froyo).

Now market researcher Canalys claims that Google
is now the top
player in the U.S. smartphone market in terms of market
share. According to Canalys's extensive study, Google owns 34
percent of the market compared to Research in Motion's 32 percent and
Apple's 21.7 percent.

Perhaps the only
analogy to what Google is doing in the history of operating systems
is Microsoft's incredible conquest of the personal computer operating
system market with Windows. Much like Windows, Google's
multi-hardware OEM, open approach, focused on providing customers
with a broad array of choices, is crushing its
more specialized competitors, like Apple (which ironically was
similarly crushed by Microsoft in the PC OS market).

That's
not to say that Apple or RIM are posting financial losses. In
fact, Apple grew 61 percent in sales year-to-year and RIM grew 41
percent. What is happening, though, is that they appear to be
missing the growth opportunity that Android has
found with its open, third-party hardware model.

Android's
success looks especially scary considering that it appears to just be
getting warmed up. Android
3.0 "Gingerbread" should launch this holiday
season with some pretty amazing new features. Motorola, HTC, and
others are reportedly already cooking up new high end handsets to
accompany the OS launch.

In terms of individual hardware OEMs,
Nokia still is the dominant party, owning 38 percent of the market.
Overall smartphone sales rose 64 percent on a year-to-year basis.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

ok I see what they did... they are assuming Nokia has smart phones of the same class as an iPhone or Evo or droid....

the world number that i showed was off in this respect, they are using, it looks like, any phone as a smart phone with a keyboard of some sort to come up total world number, they appear to be using 64 million world wide smart phones as their number, using anything that has more functions than a regular phone and classifying it as a smart phone...

anyway, using the US number, Apple has sold 8.4 million world wide... about half of these are in the US...

so about 28% market share of the US... and who knows for the World, since Canalys appears to be using anything with a keyboard as a smart phone....

in otherwords, not very comparable numbers....

for a more comparable relationship..... Apple sold more Smart phones than HTC, and more than Motorola for the US and world... and less phones than RIM and Nokia if using phones with keyboards as a definition of a smart phone... but Apple also sole more than anyone if using a large multi touch screen as a type of a category of smart phones...

"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." -- Bill Gates